Astronomy

Credit: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM More than 30 years ago, the European comet mission Giotto flew past Halley's comet. The Bernese ion mass spectrometer IMS, led by Prof. em. Hans Balsiger, was on board. A key finding from the measurements…

Credit: MSU Photo by Adrian Sanchez-Gonzalez BOZEMAN -- A new search led by Montana State University has revealed more than a dozen massive black holes in dwarf galaxies that were previously considered too small to host them, and surprised…

Toward the end of 2017, a massive new region of magnetic field erupted on the Sun's surface next to an existing sunspot. The powerful collision of magnetic energy produced a series of potent solar flares, causing turbulent space weather…

Credit: NAOJ/M. Tanaka Astrophysics, Galaxies: The most distant dying galaxy discovered so far, more massive than our Milky Way -- with more than a trillion stars -- has revealed that the 'cores' of these systems had formed…

Credit: NAOJ Astronomers at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) have analyzed the paths of two objects heading out of the Solar System forever and determined that they also most likely originated from outside of…

A low-mass planet candidate orbiting Proxima Centauri at a distance of 1.5 AU An analysis of cyclical changes in the light spectrum emitted by Proxima Centauri, the star closest to the Sun, suggests it may be orbited by a second planet.…

Warm, cold, just right? Physicists at the University of California, Davis are taking the temperature of dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up about a quarter of our universe. We have very little idea of what dark matter is…

A single star has provided information about the collision of the Milky Way with the dwarf galaxy Gaia-Enceladus. The event likely took place approximately 11.5 billion years agoCredit: J. T. Mackereth The dwarf galaxy…

Credit: Anna Ciurlo, Tuan Do/UCLA Galactic Center Group Astronomers from UCLA's Galactic Center Orbits Initiative have discovered a new class of bizarre objects at the center of our galaxy, not far from the supermassive black hole…

Credit: NAOJ/Kasuga et al. At around 1 a.m. local standard time on April 29, 2017, a fireball flew over Kyoto, Japan. Compared to other fireballs spotted from Earth, it was relatively bright and slow. Now, scientists have…